Instrument Record

Category · atmosphere

CO₂ is the cleanest instrument on the desk.

Mauna Loa since March 1958 is not controversial. The longer archive is Law Dome ice and firn, published by Etheridge / MacFarling Meure and archived at NOAA. Splice them at 1958 and the industrial rise sits on 1,800 years of near-280 ppm.

Last 2,000 years — ice core to Mauna Loa

Law Dome DSS/DE08 (MacFarling Meure et al. 2006, NOAA) until 1958 · NOAA GML Mauna Loa annual after

Pre-industrial CO₂ is not a perfectly flat 280 ppm — Law Dome resolves about 10 ppm variations — but nothing in the ice matches the post-1800 climb. The Keeling curve below is the last 5 cm of this plot.

Keeling curve

NOAA GML Mauna Loa monthly mean and deseasonalized

CO₂ against UAH temperature

Deseasonalized CO₂ (right axis) · UAH TLT (left). Different units, same time.

The secular CO₂ rise is monotonic; temperature is not. El Niño years lift both the troposphere and the CO₂ growth rate; they do not explain the 100+ ppm climb since 1958.

Companion desks

Same project, other questions.

They are not extra series on these charts — they are the arguments about ice versus stomata, the 20th-century blade, the ¹³C fingerprint, the 1988 polar forecasts, and what CERES actually attributes the last 26 years to.

Stomata vs Ice

Plant leaves keep a growing-season count of pores. Antarctic ice keeps bubbles of old air. Ice-core CO₂ is heavily smoothed; stomatal series still carry century-scale swings that only meet the ice at the instrumental splice.

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Hockey Stick Lab

Mann, Bradley & Hughes 1998 made a shaft-and-blade by overweighting the Sheep Mountain bristlecone (CA534) by as much as 390×. Strip that weight and the 1910–1938 climb is already there. Drag the weight yourself against HadCRUT5.

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δ¹³C Ledger

The “fossil isotopic signature” is not a raw intercept. Station Keeling plots sit near −13‰; the textbook −28‰ is an isoflux term after gravity, diffusion, blank and scale corrections. The ledger separates observation from the model step.

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Arctic and Antarctic vs the 1988 estimates

1988-era scenarios warmed both poles under well-mixed greenhouse gas. The split is not that: Arctic air rose; Antarctic did not. Sea-level rise since 1900 is expansion-scale, not a melt pulse matching those polar-ice forecasts.

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NZ Atlas

Nikolov & Zeller and Goessling, Rackow & Jung land on the same CERES fact: the last ~26 years of warming track absorbed sunlight from a falling planetary albedo. They split on story; the satellite number they both use is albedo, not CO₂ forcing.

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